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What are the benefits of transcribing your podcasts and what's the best way to go about getting them on your site? Niki Mosier breaks it down into 8 easy steps in this week's episode of Whiteboard Friday.

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Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Here's another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Niki Mosier, a senior SEO account manager at Two Octobers, and I'm here today to talk to you about the not-so-secret value of podcast transcripts.

I got the idea to play around with podcast transcripts after hearing Moz's Britney Muller talk about machine learning and podcast transcripts at TechSEO Boost last fall.

+15% increase in organic traffic, +50% keyword lift

I ended up getting the opportunity to play around with this a little bit with a pro bono client we had at a previous job, the Davis Phinney Foundation. They do Parkinson's research and Parkinson's education. They were already podcasting, and then they also had a pretty robust blog, but they weren't adding their podcast transcripts. After about three months of adding a couple of podcast transcripts, we saw some pretty good value for them. We saw a 15% increase in organic traffic to the website and a 50% increase to some keyword lift around the keywords that we were tracking.

Google is now indexing podcasts

Why we think this is relevant right now, as you may know, Google announced, at I/O 2019, that they are indexing podcasts. If you do a search for your favorite podcast, you'll see that come up in the Google search results now. So adding that podcast transcript or any audio transcript to your website, whether that's video, a webinar, or anything, just has some really good value.

How to transcribe & optimize your podcasts

I'm going to walk you through the process that I used for them. It's super easy and you can turn around and apply it to your own website.

1. Download your audio file

So obviously, download the audio file, whether that's MP3 or MP4 or whatever you have, from your video, podcast, or your webinars if you're doing those.

2. Transcribe it

You need to be able to get that text transcript, so running it through either Temi or Otter.ai, both two resources that I've used, both really good. Otter.ai seems to be a little cleaner out of the gate, but I would definitely obviously go through and edit and make sure that all of your text and speaker transitions and everything is accurate.

3. Figure out which keywords the content should rank for

Next up is figuring out what keywords that you want that content to rank for, so doing some search volume research, figuring out what those keywords are, and then benchmarking that keyword data, so whether your website is already ranking for some of those keywords or you have new keywords that you want those pages or those posts to be ranking for.

4. Get a competitive snapshot

Next up is getting a competitive snapshot, so looking at who's ranking for those keywords that you're going to be trying to go after, who has those answer boxes, who has those featured snippets, and then also what are the people also ask features for those keywords.

5. Get your content on-site

Obviously getting that content on your site, whether that's creating brand-new content, either a blog or a page to go with that podcast, video, webinar, or whatever it is, or adding to it to existing content.

Maybe you have some evergreen content that's not performing well for you anymore. Adding a transcript to that content could really kind of give it a lift and make it work better for you.

6. Optimize the content

Next up is optimizing the content on your site, so adding in those keywords to your metadata, to your image alt tags, your H1 tags, and then also adding any relevant schema, so whether that's blog post schema most likely or any other schema type that would be helpful, getting that up there on the page as well.

7. Make sure the page is indexed in Search Console

Once you've done all the hard work, you've got the transcript up there, you have your content and you have it optimized, you obviously want to tell Google, so going into Search Console, having them index that page, whether it's a new page or an existing page, either way, dropping that URL in there, making sure Google is crawling it, and then if it is a new page, making sure it's in your sitemap.

8. Annotate the changes in Google Analytics

Then the last thing is you want to be able to track and figure out if it's working for you. So annotating that in Google Analytics so you know what page, when you added it, so you can have that benchmark date, looking at where you're ranking, and then also looking at those SERP features. Have you gotten any featured snippets?

Are you showing up in those answer boxes? Anything like that. So that's kind of the process. Super easy, pretty straightforward. Just play with it, test it out.

If Google is indexing podcasts, why does this matter?

Then kind of lastly, why is this still important if Google is already indexing podcasts? They may come out and do their own transcription of your podcast or your video or whatever content you have on the site.

Obviously, you want to be in control of what that content is that's going on your site, and then also just having it on there is super important. From an accessibility standpoint, you want Google to be able to know what that content is, and you want anyone else who may have a hearing impairment, they can't listen to the content that you're producing, you want them to be able to access that content. Then, as always, just the more content, the better. So get out there, test it, and have fun. Thanks, Moz fans.

Actually a really good idea, I have many youtube vids which I have embedded on my various sites but I've missed out transcribing the text, which of course increases the amount of content and keywords that a page then contains.

I rarely listen to podcasts because most of them are boring. So I go straight to the transcript and am done in half of the time. I'd like to see obvious topic breaks in transcripts. Would save me more time. :-)

I agree with Adrian above. This seems like a great way to back-fill content onto pages on a website if it already has video embedded, but no transcription. Seems to have a great potential for keyword and content to be added without actually making new content for a page.

Would be a great way to boost an older page's relevance again compared to newer pages on the same website.

Hi Niki, great article especially as we just started doing it. Could you tell me if it is better to have a directly entered transcript on to the page as I have used download pdf links for all my podcasts and videos. Would PDF's not be indexed by Google? Many thanks in advance...Nigel

Really interesting topic, I guess nobody is surprised about the fact that the inclusion of quallity content in your site can improve your metrics, but I have never realised the amount of good content that we keep in other not so easy to read formats. I think I will take it as a new year purpose.

btw, I was surprised to discover that Google is already transcribing the podcasts OMG.

The basic idea is to squeeze as much out of the orange as possible. With a video, you can post the transcript, perhaps paraphrase several versions of it on different blogs, and create a bunch of backlinks with all of these posts.